Question

I’m looking for a way to scan for hard disks without incurring the ‘floppy tax’ of the system attempting to read the floppy drive to see if there’s a disk in there.

Important: I know how to use DriveInfo.GetDrives to get just hard disks, but that involves filtering after the list has been created. What I want to do is filter before, if it’s possible.

Answer 1

You can try this :

ConnectionOptions opts = new ConnectionOptions();
ManagementScope scope = new ManagementScope(@"\\.\root\cimv2", opts);
SelectQuery diskQuery = new SelectQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_LogicalDisk WHERE (MediaType != 0 AND MediaType = 11 OR MediaType = 12)");

ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(diskQuery);
ManagementObjectCollection diskObjColl = searcher.Get();

Media types 11 and 12 are not floppy. You can find full documentation here : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa394173%28v=vs.85%29.aspx